Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

Good morning and happy Thursday, everyone!  Baseball is happening, the White Sox are in a close second place, we had a bit of snow here in Chicago and...seriously, what the hell is that?  Screw snow, let's see what I found this week.

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Everyone loves Persepolis, of course.  But I think I might love this just a little bit more, where Marjane condenses decades of listening to her grandmother and her mother and their various friends gossip and laugh and talk about sex while the men have gone off for their afternoon naps.  It's wonderful in how it feels so true and sad and funny at times.  And frankly, if you have never read Persepolis, you absolutely should and if you've never seen the movie adaptation it's pretty great.  

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I'll admit, I have zero idea what's going on here.  I knew zippity-doo about the late Eric Ambler before running across this today.   But seriosuly, look at this cover!  Explosions!  Guns!  So many exclamation points!  A blurb from Alfred Hitchcock!  The smell of acid-washed paper from 1973!  Ain't no way, now that I'm employed again, that I'm not going to read this on the El in a half hour.

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OK, not gonna lie, I've not read a lot of Jack Vance (who passed away in 2013).  But the ones I have read are kind of weirdly sprightly and fun for a writer of his generation, and I cannot help but love that one of his last publications in 2010 was a memoir that he won a Hugo for: This Is Me, Jack Vance!  Like come on, that's an incredible title that made me immediately request it from the library.  Meanhile, this has a wizard and a plant lady.  

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Hell yeah, someone dumped a bunch of these in a local Little Free Library and I love the variety of these covers.  The Ace covers are the lurid ones and the Tor ones are the slightly less lurid ones.  I'm sure I've read Brust at some point but...I can't remember anything.  

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I only knew this by reputation before, but running across this, an alternate-history take on Queen Elizabeth I made me toss it to the top of TBR pile.  Much as I believe all royals should be deposed and given a job in a little shop...I love alternate history novels about what might have been and so on.  (Like, for instance, The Royal We and it's sequel from the Fug Girls, which is in a slightly alternate modern England.)  And this looks just lovely with the art and the writing about Albion.